Start with why - Leadership and OKR

As Marty Cagan says in Empowered, to empower teams you don’t need fewer leaders or managers, you need better leaders and managers!

The same is true of outcomes based planning using OKRs.

Unfortunately, OKR is not a silver bullet. Not only does it fail to make up for ineffective management, it tends to amplify it. In this brief article I outline some of the leadership behaviours I’ve seen in the best OKR implementations.

Empowerment requires better leadership, not less leadership

First things first

Or as Simon Sinek says, start with why. People need a reason to get behind something. It’s down to the leadership to provide that context.

People want to know why the organisation is implementing OKR, what it hopes to achieve and ideally how it will measure success.

At one organisation I worked with, OKRs were adopted to ensure everybody in the organisation knows how their work contributes to the strategy.

We measured that through a standard question in regular employee surveys.

Embody the change

Focusing on outcomes is not a superficial change. Leaders have to put it at their front and centre for it to mean anything to the rest of the organisation. Leading by example is critical.

OKRs need to become the lingua franca of the organisation. Leaders should discuss them publicly and often, for examples in town halls, briefings and particularly in 1:1s.

Let’s use an update meeting to a leader as an example. Traditionally these sessions talked about outputs or in other terms what had been delivered. In an outcomes focused world leaders ask about progress towards outcomes. This requires the teams to show their working out and lead with evidence.

Teresa Torres powerfully advocates for teams sharing their thinking with stakeholders, not just their conclusions.

As a stakeholder encourage this behaviour by drilling down beyond the ‘what?’ to the ‘why?’.

Lead with evidence

Where evidence is missing from discussions, more subjective elements come into play. One of my least favourite is what I call charisma based prioritisation.

Or as Shreyas Doshi said:Something I’ve observed over the years:

Product Managers who always win real-time debates about product issues — with their quips, eloquent arguments, bulletproof analogies & metaphors — tend to build surprisingly mediocre products, with mediocre outcomes.

The corollary to this is ensure you don’t withhold decisions until you have perfect information. You will never get it. This means that at times you will make the wrong decisions, but that’s inevitable. Accepting you can’t get everything right is essential step in outcomes based planning.

Lead with Psychological Safety

Leaders need to set a context in which teams are prepared to take risks, experiment and learn from their mistakes. Recently the term psychological safety has become more widely used to describe this state.

Amy Edmonson describes some research in her book The Fearless Organisation, “A key insight from this work was that psychological safety is not a personality difference but rather a feature of the workplace that leaders can and must help create.”

Success with outcomes based planning is dependent on setting the right context. It isn’t about decision making, it’s about helping others to succeed. All firmly within the domain of the leader.